>>13891881Because the cost to make a parachute of that caliber would greatly exceed the value of whatever's inside the asteroid. Rocks and metals are very dense, and the square-cube law will sneak up on you VERY FAST. A rock a few inches across weighs a few pounds; a rock a few feet across weighs a literal ton. What even is "the size of a school"? I'll spitball ~100 feet, 30 meters diameter, to make the math easier, and assume a perfectly spherical asteroid.
That's 14,137 cubic meters, asteroids have a density of ~2g/cm^3, which comes out to 28,274,000 metric tons. For reference, an aircraft carrier is about 100,000 tons. So, you know, just the weight of about 283 of those.
